[S5E5] Apple in China with Patrick McGee

Apple, perhaps the world's most influential company, has deeply intertwined its business with the People's Republic of China. In Apple and China, this fraught relationship is explored, including its implications for the future of manufacturing, high technology, and even Apple's survival. Welcome to Business Books and Company. Every month we read great business books and explore how they can help us navigate our careers. Read along with us so you can become a stronger leader within your company or a more adept entrepreneur. We're pleased this week to be joined by the author of Apple in China, Patrick Magee. But before we get to Patrick, let's introduce ourselves.

Hi, I'm David Short. I'm a product manager.

Hi, I'm Kevin Hudak, a chief research officer at a Washington, D.C. based commercial real estate research and advisory firm.

And I'm David Kopeck. I'm an associate professor of computer science at a teaching college. Patrick McGee is the author of Apple in China, widely considered one of the most compelling business books of 2025. His research and original reporting bring the entire saga of Apple's relationship with China into a new light that helps the reader understand not only how much Apple has benefited from China, but also how much China has benefited from Apple. Apple in China raises important questions about how much control the Chinese government has over Apple's policies, how much Apple has contributed to the rise of China as a threat to the US Tech economy, and how sustainable Apple's current supply chain is given several competitive and geopolitical risks. Prior to writing Apple in China, Patrick spent a decade reporting for the Financial Times, where he continues to report. He was the paper's principal Apple reporter from 2019 to 2023. Patrick, thank you for joining us on the show.

That was considerably shorter than what you did for Pat Gelsinger, but I guess he has a more illustrious career than me, so I'll forgive you. Yeah, no, thank you. No.

It's awesome to have you on the show, Patrick. And I was thinking before we got into the details of the book, you could just give us a little bit of your background in relation to getting into reporting on Apple. So how did you first get involved with reporting about Apple and how did that lead you to ultimately writing this book?

So I'll try not to go too far back, but as an undergrad, I studied religion, which is famously interesting, but gives you no job offers upon conclusion or graduation. So in a sense, you know, my only skill set was maybe thinking critically, reading and writing. And so journalism, I guess, just became a sort of default, you know, something I could fall into and just as I did that, around 2006, the financial crisis began to grew. And so we, I think mostly associated with Lehman Brothers in 2008. But I sort of, you know, got an early inkling. So by the time everyone was catching up to it in 2008, I'd already been a sort of financial reporter for a solid 18 months or so. So I sort of went from absolute zero to understanding credit markets and bonds and such. That basically led later to a job covering the bond markets for the Wall Street Journal. And then the Financial Times hired me to cover Asian markets out of Hong Kong. And so if you do that Steve Jobsian thing where you connect the dots looking backwards, I sort of think the origins of the book were covering Asian, well, you know, covering the rise of China. I mean, as I was in Hong Kong during Xi Jinping's first term, when you began to have sort of like a clamoring in the streets, you know, for either independence or democracy or whatever. The various things. I'm saying whatever, because there were various things that people in Hong Kong not acting as a monolith but were asking for. Then I covered the Volkswagen scandal, living out of Germany and very much supply chains and sort of walking in and out of factories all the time and beginning to understand Germany's dependence on China. So they were, the economy was really booming, but they were sort of giving up all their technological know how to China. And that became pretty interesting. And then I became the Apple reporter. So you couple those things together, right? Basically like China, supply chains and Apple. I think that only in retrospect, of course, but that's sort of the origins of the book.

That's really interesting. So I think a lot of our listeners will already know the early history of Apple with Woz and Jobs in the garage and everything. But can you take us back to the beginnings of outsourcing? Why did Apple start to outsource their manufacturing in the 90s? How did that come about?

Yeah, I'm sure lots of people know the history, or at least they think they know. But that sort of missing topography is that they're a manufacturing company, right? I mean, these are two Steves in a garage. You know, some people, usually an Apple history begins with the Apple ii. You know, we forget that it's called the Apple II because there's an Apple one. Well, what's the Apple one? It's a circuit board. That's all it is. It's a fully assembled circuit board. That was the genius of Steve Wozniak. He could design a Circuit board. And so they make stuff themselves. It's sort of the DNA of the company. It's in the ethos of the company. And Steve Jobs is this, you know, maniacally obsessive figure in good ways and bad. And you want to control your destiny through manufacturing. It's worth knowing that there is no electronic supply chain in the late 1970s, not for personal computers. I mean, the product has basically just been invented. And so it's not just like an ethos, like there's not even a choice about the matter. Things begin to change in the 1980s when the PC has been cloned and you have someone like Michael Dell, you know, birthing Dell out of his dormitory. And so he's not in a factory, he's sort of managing the logistics of things. And so that goes on really for a decade. And of course Steve Jobs gets kicked out of the company and he's sort of in this 12 year exile founding next, where he's still building it himself. And his favorite one thing he says about the Next computer is my favorite thing about it is that it was not built in Osaka. So that's obviously Japan, not China. But he really cared about building things. By the time Windows 95 comes out, the PC world has absolutely taken over Apple. And, and it's really interesting how Apple has lost, right? They haven't lost for the things that Steve Jobs wanted to define computers by. They haven't lost because Windows or anything Microsoft was doing was superior to Apple. But the PC boom has won because if you control 95% of the market and you're getting more and more stuff built in Asia and you've got interchangeable parts and the computer aesthetics and stuff aren't really a consideration. Well, you can just price things at a cheap rate and sort of every household in America is wanting to have a PC and it just becomes the de facto standard, which means that developers don't prioritize the Mac and so forth. And so the company is basically just irrelevant by the early early 1996. And my book begins with this sort of stunning anecdote where, you know, they're days away from being able to pay their 14,000 people on the payroll and they have to sell a Samsung Colorado facility that, you know, most people who probably think they do know the Apple history don't even know this thing. And yet to me, it's a seminal moment because it's what sparks the first time Apple has a global outsourcing strategy. So it's total desperation. They do not have the money to continue building their own computers, they need to move to a third party operation. And there's more to the story here and if you've read the book, you'll know that I then go back in time to tell that certain peripheral products, that Newton, for instance, the printer, those were outsourced. And so Apple's not starting from scratch, but it's the first time that, you know, PCs or, sorry I should say desktop computers for Apple are going to be made by somebody else instead of Apple.

But I just want to be super clear for our young listeners to jump in on something you were saying there. Right, so you're right. Me, David and Kevin, we assumed that everyone knows the history, but Apple owned factories. Just for the people who like are not aware that. And just think about it as this company that has always. Because they just know about it from the iPhone on. Apple had factories right, in California, Colorado, Ireland, all over the world, Singapore, all over the world. And you really made that a focal point of kind of how this transition happened. And the imac seemed to be a point where the transition became really paramount. Like, and you talk about that in the book, the kind of multiple revisions of the imac. Why was the imac so important for them in terms of the transformation of their manufacturing?

So when Steve Jobs comes back, there's this fascinating anecdote where he goes to meet Johnny. I've for the first time intending to fire the guy because he looks at all of Apple's products and he says, well, they're all shit. I clearly don't have a great design team. And Jony, I've doesn't think the meeting's gonna go well either. So he shows up with a resignation letter in his pocket. And of course instead they have a total melding of the minds. And you know, there's this obscure product, it's sort of related to the Newton, but it's called the E. Oh gosh, I'm getting it wrong. Emate. It's this little 300, right? EME 300. Thank you. Yeah, sorry. So it's, I quote someone saying it looked like a tight green butt in Spandex. And it runs the Newton operating system, but it's a laptop essentially for the education market. But it's like a grayscale screen and so forth and it's made of translucent plastic like before the imac. Right. They're actually shipping this thing. And Steve Jobs loved it. And I know that because I've got some notes that no one's been able to use before. But I was able to obtain them for the book where he really likes this thing. And so he goes to meet Johnny and of course the ID team, industrial design team has been doing all sorts of really cool experiments. I mean you can actually find some of this stuff now. They had, you know, Macs that instead of beige box max, they were translucent plastic, like completely see through with all the wires and stuff. And so I guess just Steve Jobs just gets totally enamored by this stuff. And the famous quote that he says according to Ian Parker of the New Yorker is fuck, you guys haven't been very effective, have you? And that sounds like he's dissing them. But actually what he's saying is you're obviously brilliant designers, but you don't know your own worth or you don't know how to communicate that. And so in the late 1990s, I mean just remember Apple's in crisis and these designers trying to do this cool stuff, they're just getting nowhere because to the engineering LED teams, design is just an irritant. And Steve Jobs just totally flips that on his head and says we're not going to beat the IBM PCs of this world by having competitive prices. That's just not going to work for us. So we need to build things, which means we need to design things in a totally different way. That sort of redefines the aesthetics and why you want to own a computer. You know, he doesn't want it sort of in the basement in some cloistered off corner. He wants it near your kitchen. And so it needs to look more like a cool coffee machine or something, right? A piece of art that you might have and be, you know, have friends are going to comment on it or whatever. So this is sort of the origins of what becomes the Bondi Blue imac. The problem is of course they can't build it. I mean, however impressive Apple engineers are, they are not CRT experts. Cathode ray tubes. And so they use their analog CRT supplier, which is LG in Korea to basically design or not design, but build this computer that they design. And one of the first chapters about this is called Unmanufacturable because the thing that Jony I've and team come up with, like the engineers cannot make it and Apple spends months trying to figure out like is our product design team just shit? Like can they just not do this or is there something wrong with the design itself? So it's this really interesting chapter and of course it's just never been told because we've never cared to look at how do you actually build the things that come out of the mind of Jony? I've, you know, there's just, I mean, I don't know, you just go Google this around or whatever. Go find me a great chapter or an essay somewhere or a magazine on. On how the ipod was actually built and who made it and what were the problems on the production line. I don't know why, but journalists just haven't bothered to ask these questions for 25 years. So the origin of the whole book was just that realization and then saying, let's tell that story. And of course by doing so you introduce all sorts of geopolitical dilemmas and tension because Apple's success has come at this massive cost of sort of getting lured into China and then being stuck there. So, sorry, I'm probably giving too much away. There's.

I was just going to say I love that about your book. I think I've read almost every Apple book ever written and you're the first. You wrote the first one that really got into the manufacturing side to any degree. I mean, obviously the whole book is about it, but a lot of the books gloss over it so much. Why do you think that bias is in there and that so many other books don't even touch on it?

I have no definitive answer, but I have a couple. So one, just going back to my own personal history there. The fact that I lived in Hong Kong and then was studying supply chains and writing about how to build cars, where that is kind of more of the story. I guess that just made me ask some of the right questions. I mean, you know, if you're covering Silicon Valley and Apple's one of the companies you follow, none of the other companies fit the bill. I mean, Google's not really making anything that would cause you to sort of be in a Google factory somewhere. The same thing is, broadly speaking, true of Meta or Amazon, even Nvidia. I mean, Nvidia doesn't fabricate their own chips or anything. So I think there's just a sense that if you're a California based reporter, you're not really in and out of factories the way you are. That if you were based in Germany, if you're based in Shenzhen, let's say. The other thing, of course, is that it's not going to be reported in China because they just don't have a free media. So you just don't have some flourishing Chinese paper where reporters are in and out of factories talking to Foxconn people all day long. So there's that. The Other answer is just that Apple is ridiculously good at controlling the narrative, whether it's conscious or unconscious. The whole Apple landscape in the media basically gets concerned about what the new iPhone is going to look like. I mean if you want to see like the most tweeted stuff right now on Apple, you know, it's just going to be about like whether the new iPhone is called the air and is really thin. I mean, I just don't give a shit. I mean it's just not part of what I care about at all. And so I just think we're so obsessed with design questions. Even though the design guy, Johnny, I've left in 2019 and there's literally it's a vacant position. I mean Apple is iconic when it comes to design. Literally hasn't had a chief design officer for 2019. And then the other design guy, Jony, I've. I mean, sorry. Steve jobs died in 2011. Like this is an operations led company and we still treat it because Steve Jobs is so damn good. We still treat it like it's a Steve Jobs run company and it isn't. And so, so there's just sort of a wake up call uncovering like the underbelly of this company that, you know, Apple is probably furious with me because I'm covering all the things they don't want you to talk about. Right. How the sausage is made.

Kopeck. It's funny, I was going to say that I thought there was some manufacturing in the Isaacson Steve Jobs book, but I'm wrong. I'm remembering now it's next that they go into. So they do talk about the factory for next and it's like all painted and perfect and then blew way too much money on, on the factory because he wanted everything in America and everything. But it was, it was next not, not Apple other than, you know, whatever they, they talk about the, doing it in the, the garage and everything. But that's really it. That was the first time I actually heard about his, his sister was the one who was doing the, the initial boards in your book. Patrick so really appreciated that.

Well and, and I think one of the reasons I really liked this book too was there were a few inflection points where you sense the gravity of decisions that were being made. Like, you know, Kopeck just asked about the, you know, the imac representing one of those shifts and even like listeners to our podcast know I love like the cinematic vibes in books and it seemed like about a quarter to a half through the book when the imac and even like the iMac G4 discussion, all of those discussions and scenes and vignettes were taking place in Cupertino and you were having the arguments and Steve Jobs staring down some of the designers, you know, wonder, you know, basically just yelling at them in their faces. But it was very much a Cupertino focused story. Sitting in the boardroom, sitting in the conference rooms or across the street at id. Then at that point it really shifts to long violent lines. Outside of Apple's first Apple store in China, it's more in the, the COVID kind of like zombie environment looking Covid shutdown state. So it almost takes a dark turn at that point. And I really appreciated that.

Well, thank you. My editor had advice that should have been pretty basic to an author, but it was actually really valuable to me. And it was think in scenes. So every chapter essentially should begin where, you know, a film director should be able to be like, yep, I understand who the characters are, what the scene would be, et cetera. And that's really why, like there's a chapter early in Taiwan where, you know, it begins in a karaoke bar where this Apple engineer is recognizing that there's something strange about some of these characters. And what he's recognizing is that in their, in their sharp suits and interesting a, you know, manner of speaking and, and sort of a sort of arrogance to some degree. He's recognizing that these are gangsters and that there's a problem in the Apple supply chain which is that they're paying Quanta, their, their contract manufacturer, but Quanta is not actually paying the suppliers, the sub suppliers that it's supposed to be paying. And so Apple has just spent the last couple days beating up on all these engineers, trying to get them to perfect their processes and then is slowly realizing that these suppliers haven't even been paid because all the money's been tied up in these triad like organizations in Taiwan. And then just allows you to tell this brief history of Taiwan where like there's these gangsters that go back there. I don't know what the Taiwanese name is, but they're like the Yakuza in Japan, which are more well known. And you know, when Taiwan goes after all these gangsters to really like sort of take care of organized crime, some of them just run for office and then you have sort of the gangsters involved in the politics. And so the lines between sort of legal and illegal in Taiwan become really blurry. And so Apple, it's just sort of like this moment where it's like, how does this American corporation navigate these kind of things. But it's one of the early reasons why Apple has to take control of the supply chain, because they can't just leave it willy nilly to what turns out being like a bunch of nefarious actors and nefarious activity. So anyway, so just like the smoke filled room where people are singing karaoke songs is just like the great way to open that chapter. And I just tried to do that over and over. So I'm glad that you picked up on that.

Kevin, tell us a little bit more about Quanta and Foxconn and Luxshare and the contract manufacturers. So how did they get started? What is their role both for Apple's execution and then how does that shift into an impact on the broader technology industry?

That's a big question. How do they get started? I'm not sure. I know the founding dates of Quanta and inventech and so forth. I mean, to some extent it goes back to the birth of the IBM PC, where the big decision that IBM makes, I mean, you have to remember, I quote Steve Ballmer saying that at the time, IBM was the sun, the moon, the stars of the PC industry. If you could name one technology company in the early 80s, it was IBM. I mean, they were just absolutely massive. And so when they move into building a PC because they're the leader in mainframe, I mean, they're literally the America's most valuable company for decades until, until the 80s. And so when they move into PCs, everyone expects that they're going to build something with, let's say, some features that are going to be too difficult for everybody else to match. Or maybe they're just going to do something that is, you know, not very good because they're such a bureaucratic organization. And IBM kind of stuns everybody by basically building this like 12 person team, puts them in Boca Raton, Florida. And they decided to essentially outsource everything. And they allowed IBM divisions to bid on certain contracts for supplying things. But those IBM subdivisions aren't put in any sort of elevated position. So what that means is that this computer, the IBM PC in 1981, is basically bandaged together of existing parts and they're interchangeable and they're standardized. And so try to think of like Thomas Friedman talking about the world being flat, right? This is like the paradigmatic example of that, where once the IBM is cloned by the likes of Compaq and then later Dell and HP and all these companies, they're not differentiating against each other by design. They're all using intel chips. They're all wanting Windows. It's all about logistics, distribution, and manufacturing. It's not about anything else. There's no sexy computer in the 1990s until the iMac comes around. And so what that means is that Asia and places that have abundant labor, some sophistication in their assembly lines and, you know, currencies that are undervalued and stuff, they all have this advantage in supplying parts. And so in the late 1980s, you get these Taiwanese companies that begin making motherboards for the computer industry. And once they sort of know how to do one thing, they sort of look at what that part connects to right in the innards of a computer, and then they start making that part, and then they expand, expand, expand, until eventually they can do the whole kit and caboodle, if you will, you know, brand it with an HP logo or whatever and send it back to America. So that's sort of the, you know, whiplash speed, you know, origin story of the Taiwanese getting involved. And then there's some distinctions between Foxconn and the others. But essentially part of the story there is that Taiwanese don't necessarily know how to do this stuff. And so it's American engineers that are going over to teach them. And so Apple's early outsourcing efforts before the comeback of Steve Jobs is making the Newton in Japan with Sharp and then making the Newton's second generation with Inventech in Taiwan. And the laptops in the early 1990s are made out of Japan. So essentially, this sounds like an obscure episode in Apple history, but for me, it's foundational, because what it means is these Apple engineers from Cupertino are flying to and from Japan all the time. And what they're recognizing is that, like, holy shit, the Japanese are brilliant at engineering. And so it just becomes more and more obvious that they should shift certain production to Japan. And by the late 1990s, everything is moving, and Japan just ends up being sort of too expensive. So Taiwan becomes the place. Taiwan becomes too expensive, so China becomes the place. And to fast forward today, China's been becoming too expensive, so India might be the place.

And so this kind of contrasts what you were just talking about, Patrick, in terms of how the IBM PC was cloned so quickly. In fact, my first PC was a Compaq, funny enough. So I remember loading up Encarta and my dinosaur game in Carmen San Diego on my Compaq back in the 90s. But I'm wondering, you described the iPhone when they were first setting that up as it was a startup within Apple almost, and they were fully enabled and empowered. Is that kind of different than what you were describing for IBM PCs where they were just developed with kind of off the shelf products? And did that mean that the iPhone had a bit more longevity before it was cloned, you know, by some of the Chinese competitors?

That's funny. I did make the connection between Boca Raton team making the PC and the iPhone.

You started almost describing them as a startup in Boca Raton, but then you were saying, well, they were using off shelf parts, they weren't as empowered. Then in your book you talk about how. And what resonated with me was the iPhone team with Tony Fadell was almost like its own startup. Skunk works within the company.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's interesting. I just hadn't drawn the connection. I think you're right about that. I think what has happened is that the ipod becomes wildly successful. I mean, people don't remember, but the ipod is the first time that Apple really like gains a certain cultural preeminence. However sexy the candy colored imac is that we talked about, that was Never more than 4% market share, 5% market share. I mean, I quote a Fortune article in 2001 that says Apple risks being as inconsequential as Liechtenstein. When I said that to a family member, they said, what's Liechtenstein? Which makes my point for me. Right. And the ipod is just in a totally different league. I mean, one thing that I didn't really realize is that it's a failure for the first two years after coming out in 2001. But by 2023, once you make it available for the Windows market, it goes gangbusters. And within a few years, I mean, it's 80% of the iPhone, the MP3 market, I mean, that's a 40 and sliplayer calling it the ipod market. There really was nothing else. I mean, was the MP3 player of choice the entire 2000s. It becomes just an absolute icon, let's say of globalization or computing or whatever. I mean, there were stories in China of people wearing the white headphones that you get with the ipod, even if they didn't have an ipod because it could be in your pocket. So you just wanted the illusion of looking like you had an ipod. I mean, that was the status symbol that it was. And I quote somebody in the book who worked on the ipod project and they just had such contempt for the Mac team because the iteration of ipods in the heyday was incredible. I mean, you had the ipod I don't know, third or fourth generation. And then the ipod mini, within a year the ipod mini gets replaced by another ipod mini, I think like within seven or eight months. And then the ipod nano comes out. The ipod nano is like 20% the size of the original ipod. I mean it's incredibly innovative. And so Steve Jobs just basically looks as the ipod team looks like the Mac team and says the iPhone is basically going to be like a seventh, a seventh generation iPod rather than a first generation phone. Right. And so he doesn't want it to be like a Mac but for the pocket. He wants it to be an ipod that happens to be able to take phone calls. So that would be my sort of analogy. So so the I, the ipod and iPhone team kind of do get like siphoned off from the rest of the company. But it's because he doesn't like the way that Macs are produced. He thinks they're stodgy and slow and he wants that sort of like ipod relentlessness to be infused across the entire iPhone team.

And he eventually got his dream with the ipod touch. If you remember that one, that was not very useful. It had the glass screen. But I had a lot of friends who had that. So, you know, another tenuous connection that I was kind of drawing too was it seems like with the ipod, Apple's salvation lay at that point in the transition of services. Right. By opening up the services like the itunes store to Windows users, Ipod then blows up. After two years of almost failure, it seems like now they are counting on services to sort of pull them out of this hole. And some of the discomfort with China, that's funny.

I like that you're making these connections that I haven't quite made. But like, I think you're right in both cases. Yeah. I mean, I would argue that when people are talking about the diversification, like the supposed diversification from China, like actually the rise of services is more of a balance sheet diversification than anything they've done in India. And it's because services have been the fastest growing division at Apple for I think a solid six or seven years. It's also been very important for the narrative. I mean, if you actually look at sort of what a breakdown of the services revenue is, it's actually more like the fact that Google pays them $20 billion a year and that's pure profit, more so than it is Ted Lasso. But they will talk about Ted Lasso every earnings call, right? Or severance or whatever. I mean, that is probably a money losing division within Services. But by having it so public, as it were, they're able to talk about all these Hollywood stars and stuff instead of saying, and Google paid us $20 billion this year, so services is brilliant in multiple respects. But one of them is just the PR campaign that it enables.

Just to briefly get back to contract manufacturers, too, because this is sort of the establishment of Apple's reliance on or initial advantage with China. The reliance on China followed by the capture by China. I think that word that you use, capture, is so important. But in that cinematic vibe, there were a few characters who really stood out to me. And, you know, Doug Guthrie and John Ford were sort of two of my favorites that you presented going forward. But one of the big characters was Uncle Terry from Foxconn. And I'm wondering, you know, when going back to those early days of the contract manufacturing, if you could share with our readers, how did Foxconn and Uncle Terry Gow win so much of Apple's business?

Yeah, no, I'm thankful for the question because when I speak sound bites go around on X or Blue sky or whatever, the sort of most frustrating thing that I hear is, oh, his book just says, Apple did everything and China did nothing. And it's like I'm trying to say the opposite. Right. My point is that China is so helpful to Apple. Sorry. That if they try to go do this in India, it's almost obviously going to be a failure. It, like China offers so many things that you just can't find in other countries. And so I'm trying to give them all kinds of credit. And so, yeah, so Terry Guo is the most important of the contract manufacturing CEOs, and it gets a little bit wonky. So you probably don't want to hear the full answer. But essentially everybody else among the Taiwanese contract manufacturers are trying to move up the value chain and take control of design. So they call themselves ODMs, Original Design Manufacturers. And so if you are a Western PC maker, you're already offloading all of your manufacturing to somebody, so that sort of takes it off balance sheet and that creates all sorts of efficiencies. It is even better if they say, by the way, we will also design the computer for you so you don't even have to do the research and development. And it literally gets to the point where, like, catalogs are being compiled in Taiwan, where you, as a Western PC executive, just sort of pick a design preexisting out of a catalog and then they just make it for you and badge it. Can you just remember or just think about how antithetical to the entire Apple ethos or to Jony, I've. This is like, offensive, right? They don't want to do that at all. And so Foxconn is unique in a sense in not going that direction at all. They instead prioritize moving heaven and earth to respond to the designs of Apple. And so this makes them a perfect partner because Apple doesn't want any part in this, you design it for us mentality. And Foxconn wants to prioritize a strategy where they vertically integrate. So they don't want to do low value assembly either. But if they vertically integrate and take care of things, you know, well beyond the final assembly, the plastic injection molding, the metal stamping and all sorts of things, even deriving the raw materials, what that means for them politically matters a lot in China, because the more you vertically integrate, the more people you need, and the more people you need, the more dormitories and entertainment venues and grocery stores, et cetera. Teriguo is going to build. And so by doing that, he's establishing connections with the provincial officials, the city officials in China. And if you have a bit of understanding of how Chinese politics works, you know that Chinese Communism is not like Soviet communism and that it's really top down, it's federalism on steroids. The local cadres are in competition with other local cadres in different parts of the country. And so they're desperate to derive new growth in their areas. That's how they're judged. That's how you move up the ranks of the Communist Party. And so Foxconn ends up having these great political calculations to be able to get more factories, more people, et cetera, in exchange for getting growth. And the way they get growth is by partnering with Apple. So, sorry, I went on too long about that. I promise it's more interesting in the book to anyone listening, but there are tangible reasons why Foxconn is a better partner for Apple than any of the other rivals.

Oh, and they were agreeing to those contracts where they were basically producing some things that cost and not even getting a margin. And remember, what I loved in your book was how you were citing, as Apple's profit margin grew, Foxconn's was going down. But they were just playing the long game, it seemed.

Yeah, this really stunned me. I mean, I thought I was maybe looking in the wrong currency or something, because Foxconn in the first four years of the 21st century made more money in absolute dollars than Apple did. And they also made more profit margins. So, yeah, I believe in 2000. I'm going my memory here, but I believe Apple. I believe Foxconn's net margins were 10.4%, and by the end of the decade, they fall into around 2%. So there's almost like an iron law. The more closely you work with Apple, the less you make in margins. Now they are making it up for in volume, but more than that, they're making up for it in learning. So this is like the key to understanding Terry Guo. I don't know why he knows this. I don't know if it's a mystical sense. I don't know if Apple tells him. But he understands better than anybody else that even though Apple isn't a big company, they are a unique company. And to fulfill their demands means that Apple will train the hell out of your entire workforce. And then you can then go use those skills to fulfill the demands of Adele or NHP or a Sony or anyone else. And so the value of working with Apple is not the profits, it's the tuition free training, what one engineer told me is the Ivy League equivalent of hardware engineering.

Let's go a little bit deeper into that. So you just went into all the training that Apple invested in their contract manufacturers, thinking sort of about the core of the book. What was Apple's true investment in China like? Give our listeners a little bit of a sense of the scale of the personnel that are going there, the physical manufacturing investments that they're making, et cetera.

It's so funny because if I go back to where I was before I started the book, which I assume is where most readers are, they must think like, what are you talking about? Investments into China? They get their products made there. But what are these investments you speak of? And this is sort of the missing topography that the book tries to fill in, which is that China in the 2000s doesn't know how to build translucent imacs. I mean, nobody does. Fair. But it's not this experienced workforce that it is today. You know, if you think of where China was at in 1980, I mean, it's as Bora, Sub Saharan Africa. They've just come out of like three decades of just terrible rule under Chairman Mao. I mean, a famine that caused tens of millions of deaths. They don't know how to build stuff. And so when Apple goes there and they're late going there, to be clear, but they're building stuff in a totally different way. But in order to get it done at the monarchical quality and engineering tolerances that are demanded by Jony I've and Steve Jobs, they have to fly people over this unit called Manufacturing Design to teach people. And the lazy thing, by the way, the sort of lazy answer to my book is why didn't Apple just make all these investments in America? And you have to understand that what China was offering was just like low labor, a total abundance of labor, a dynamic labor force, hardworking 12 hour days. I mean, whatever you want to say about where China is and who they are, they deserve what where they're at in the world right now. They've worked their asses off and they have specific industrial policies that are frankly far superior to our own. And you just couldn't have made these investments in Pittsburgh or Ohio or something?

A zero capex environment where here's some free land from the province that you're in. There was no cost to Foxconn for establishing some of these factories, right?

Yeah. I mean, this is probably a reason why Terry Guo is so friendly with the Chinese government and has been for decades, because he's working in such close coordination with them. And so, I mean, look, to be fair, Foxconn is offering this in a sense to anybody. It's just that Apple is able to take advantage of it better than anybody else. It's hard for me to know whether this was conscious on the part of Apple or whether it was just like the confluence of the fact that for reasons that have nothing to do with China, Johnny, I was a real perfectionist. And to get it done, you just happen to have a conveyor belt logic industrial system where you could have people working for 10 seconds at a time, you know, doing one thing after the other for 12 hours a day. You just wouldn't do that in Pittsburgh. I don't know that you would do that in Tokyo. But in China that just works. And so the way my book sort of flips the usual narrative on its head is that we usually think of the Apple China relationship as one of exploitation. Right. Apple's the big bad bully who's exploiting all these Chinese workers. And we talked about I slavery and so forth. I'm not saying that's not true. I mean, there are, you know, fucked on suicides in 2010 and that sort of thing. The book doesn't focus on that really at all. I mean, I've actually been criticized for not focusing on it enough and giving Apple a quote unquote free pass, which is kind of funny to me. It's just that the narrative is already out there. I just don't care to rehash other People's reporting, I'm trying to do my own. So I flip the narrative on its head and I say, you know, the reason why China allows this to happen is the technology transfer. So it's not a story of Apple exploiting China, it's a story of why China exploits Apple. And so the investments that Apple ends up making through this manufacturing design team goes to such staggering heights that by 2015, Apple is investing $55 billion a year into the country. So that's four chips acts, if you will. And it's such a large number that I compare it to the Marshall Plan in a way that doesn't quite do justice to the comparison. I don't know what's bigger than the Marshall Plan, but Apple was spending in a five year period, the equivalent of two Marshall Plans if you adjust for inflation. So just absolutely mind boggling figures. I'm sure there's two figures that the book will forever be associated with. One is that they were spending 55 billion a year. The other one is that Apple has trained 28 million people more than the labor force of California since 2008. Once you begin to understand that, I mean, this was the origins of my book pitch. This was like, holy shit, there's a massive story to be told here. I mean, how does one corporation have this sort of impact anywhere, let alone in a country that's become America's biggest adversary? You know, whether you're sympathetic or not to China, I mean, that is who they are, you know, a rival. A pure. A pure rival. That's where the story just gets, I think, pretty incredible. I'm not trying to call my writing incredible. I just mean the actual story that I'm trying to tell is just on a really different scale than a standard corporate history.

Yeah. And I think that came across very well in the book. I want to take a brief break before we dive more into it to thank our friends at Audible for sponsoring today's episode. You can check out Apple and China and other great books over@AudibleTrial.com biz that's AudibleTrial.com biz to get a 30 day free trial of Audible as well as credits towards your first purchase. Like for example, Apple in China. And I know, Patrick, you didn't narrate the book yourself, but I listened to a bit of it and I thought the narrator did an awesome job. But getting back into this huge investment and this dependence on contract manufacturing, that Apple, in some ways in the book, it felt like the vibe was almost like they sleepwalked their Way into it, I think there was actually words like that used. I wanted to kind of talk about Tim Cook and his strategic thinking around this huge investment. And was he sleepwalking? You were a little critical of him kind of. Towards the end of the book there was a non flattering comparison of Jack Welch of ge. But obviously one of the reasons that he was entrusted with so much power at Apple, first as COO and then eventually as CEO, is because he was so successful at making the clocks run on time, getting the inventory levels down, and outsourcing. And so wasn't this a very conscious strategy of his? Wasn't he, from his beginning of his time at Apple, kind of pushing the outsourcing and just taking it to its logical conclusion? So was it strategy or was it sleepwalking?

Yeah, so there's absolutely room for debate here. I like to say I have a no villains narrative, right. When I introduced Tim Cook in a chapter called IBM West, I think that's a fair portrait of Tim Cook. I mean, I just describe him as someone who really cares about details. And the first time he holds a worldwide manager's meeting, you typically go 90 minutes to two hours. He holds it for 13 hours. Right. I mean, he is just. He's like Steve Jobs in that he has that obsessiveness. It's just not for the design of the product. It's for the, like, fulfillment of the order. You know, people would say, like years after the fact, he would still remember the cost of a riffet or something. Right. Or like, he would have a sort of like mental sense, like a, like a, like a visual sense within his brain of like, where certain planes were, you know, holding iPhone inventory and where they were in the world and stuff. Right. He's also just a different character. He's cool, calm, and collected in a way that obviously Steve Jobs is not. I mean, one of my favorite quotes in the book is talking to someone who worked with both of them, and he says the problem for working with Steve Jobs is emotionally he could go zero to a hundred in a matter of seconds and just catch you off guard and you'd be defending ourselves. Tim cook goes from 35 to 36. And somehow that was more disconcerting just because you don't know bosses that are like that. There's no Hollywood version of Tim Cook where that's the, that's the case. And so, you know, this person says, actually this is actually a different person. But they said, you know, you knew that Tim Cook was unhappy when he just said, I don't understand. And you would just see the pools of sweat dripping off the executives around him because they're trying to please this person, but you know, they don't know the answer. And he's just going layers deep into the minutiae. You know, he cares about the cost of a rivet that is fractions of a penny within each, each iPhone. They just go into incredible detail. Now, sorry, I'm going off on a tangent because I get excited about this stuff and now I'm forgetting what your question is, but who is Tim Cook and what is, is it, is it sleepwalking or, or conscious?

Well, right. Is this more conscious strategy by Tim Cook or is he sleepwalking like everyone else's?

Yeah, so, okay, so I like this. So look, the conscious part is clearly the perfectionism and the engineering, but you got to understand that Tim Cook's not going to China all that often. I mean, he might go three times a year now, I don't think he was even going once a year back in, let's say, 2007, 2009, that kind of period. But the people who are going were living, as they called it to me, a certain Groundhog Day existence, right, where you're waking up early, you're putting in a 16 hour day, your meetings are at the same time each day, the meals are the same, you're not sitting around learning Mandarin and thinking about the changing nature of the state in China and the political leadership changes and so forth. So it's just an engineering led organization, or at least it is the portion of the teams that are in China they're responding to Jony I've. They're not sort of competing with Jony I've. Right. So they're not artists in a sense. So they're sleepwalking in the sense that they're not taking into account the like second and third order impact of what it is that they're doing. And I don't blame them for this. Like, why would they be thinking of that? You know, like, I don't think your average person is thinking about that sort of thing, even really sophisticated engineers. So, I mean, I don't know. The best answer I could give is my favorite quote in the book, and it's a former VP of Apple talked to me over coffee and he says, are you sure you're not overthinking your thesis? You keep asking about geopolitics, but I was there when we set up the supply chain in China in the early 2000s, and I can tell you we weren't thinking about politics at all. And of course, my next sentence is precisely.

Precisely, that is I had it pulled up if we could screen share on page 283. And I was about to read that same quote. It's where your voice in the book just pops out so clearly. And I thought that is the sleepwalking versus strategy. I mean, that was just such a great line in that chapter about the Apple squeeze.

Thank you. That's funny about my voice because my voice, generally speaking, is not there.

Precisely. It popped out right away.

Yeah, no, you're right about that. There's a few biting remarks in the book and I sort of couldn't restrain myself. There's one about Jello, if you recall. But generally speaking, I'm not there. I certainly don't introduce myself in the narrative or anything.

And I appreciate that. I think too many. We read a lot of business books, obviously, and I think too many business writers do insert themselves into the narrative. So I appreciated that. About your book, I will say that you can read between the lines a little bit about your comparisons to GE and Jack Welch.

I think, well, Unfinished Legacy is the conclusion of the book. And that really is where I'm sort of maybe announcing myself as having just authored this book. And this is what I think the big problem would be. But even there I'm trying to be pretty restrained. Right? It's called unwritten legacy, not this guy should be fired. It could be written that way. But I'm trying to say the events will determine what his legacy is. I mean, I say that because I think Tim Cook has the status of something like a demigod of capitalism, that he's done all these great things and he saved Apple and all sorts of stuff. And I don't disagree with that. But it's come at a major cost. And if 15 years hence we continue to have very little ability to build anything, if China's dominance gets to the rate where they're doing 60, 70% of global electronics manufacturing or something like that, we have no ability, the prices are higher and our Silicon Valley is all screwed or something, you would absolutely look back and be like, where did this start? And Apple would be like the prime mover. So instead of sort of like taking that argument full on and advocating for it, I'm just saying I don't know where history is going to be, but there's a reason why the first draft of history is often different from the sort of revised assessment 20, 30 years hence. And Jack Welch is just a great example of that. Just to Sort of sum that up for people who don't know him. He's the GE CEO for 20 years, named manager of the century basically upon his retirement. And the most recent biography about him is called the man who Broke Capitalism. I think Cook could take that trajectory if he doesn't sort of take drastic action, let's say right now.

Well, I know you have the no villains, you know, mission here, but I'm happy to show my hand. This is a quote from another famous company in the 90s that blew up quite a bit called Ingen. And it's. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. And I Jurassic Park. So I was getting some of those vibes as we were watching all of the different, the value and logistical engineering going on and then the geopolitical ramifications that we, as readers know would follow from the early decisions in your book.

I'm glad you brought that up, Kevin, because I think that's a good segue about to something we've kind of been dancing around, which is, what are. Why is this problematic? I mean, we're all just assuming, because we've all read the book and of course you wrote the book, Patrick, that this is problematic. But can we talk about specifically, Patrick, like, why it's problematic? Why is this intense dependence on China risky to the company? Why is it risky for the industry? And how much Apple has, has trained these contract manufacturers who now work for other companies? Why is it risky for censorship? Like, what's at stake here?

Actually, this question alone could be an hour long podcast. And so I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no, it's fine. But it's a great question. But I guess I want to say, like, there's five or six answers racing through my head and in a sense the question is like, do I get the standard one? Do I, you know, try to give you something new just because I don't like to repeat myself.

What if I kind of break it up a little bit? Okay, so. So let's talk about. Yeah, just Apple itself. Why is it risky for Apple itself? Let's forget about the problems for consumers, maybe the problems for the industry as a whole, but why for Apple, the company, is this intense dependence problematic?

Okay, so in 2016, 2017, when China begins to ask certain things of Apple, like, hey, we don't want encrypted messaging apps on the, on the, on your phone. We don't want the New York Times on your phone because they are critical of Xi Jinping we don't want VPNs on your phone. Apple has no political capital to expend fighting those things because China knows that. What are you going to do about it? We build all of your iPhones. We've got hundreds of factories that you've made billions upon billions of dollars of investments in. What you going to do? Right. It doesn't have to be all that stated. Apple knows better than China how dependent they are, so they have no comeback to that. So that's a sad state of affairs. I guess the other thing just going beyond Apple is that even if you argue, and I think you can make a plausible argument, this has been extremely good for Apple. I mean, this is why they're a $3 trillion company. And, you know, the items on my desk are all made by Apple and they're immaculate and they're great. And obviously it's been good for China. For reasons that are probably even more obvious, it's disconcerting for the collateral damage or what economists call negative externalities, like by training entire workforces in China, you know, ipso facto, we have not done the same thing in America. So China has an insane number of STEM graduates, for instance, and we don't have that. But one reason we don't have that is what are the job prospects? If a company like Apple has $400 billion of revenue a year, but it's not investing in their own country, why as a high schooler, should you devote four years into a sort of degree doing machine tooling and plastic injection molding when there's no job to do that? So, you know, I don't blame Apple at all for the 80s, 90s and early 2000s hollowing out deindustrialization of America. But Apple was in a more dominant position in the early 2000 and tens to make changes to build resiliency into their supply chain. And they didn't make those decisions. But that said, I'm also cognizant that, remember what was happening. Steve Jobs had just died. Nobody had faith that Tim Cook could fill his shoes. And so he's not a founder. He doesn't have the ability to say, well, we're just not going to have an iPhone for two years because we're moving this. He couldn't say that to someone like Xi Jinping. And so you have to sort of be cognizant of what choices they could really make. And so I actually don't think I'm all that hard on Tim Cook because it's easy to take cheap shots. It's harder to just give a neutral sense of, here's how it happens. And, you know, I have a specific paragraph that's in my mind right now because someone tweeted it last night, and it says something along the lines of, you know, the point is not to condemn Apple or Tim Cook. It's just to understand the predicament they're in. And the wider ramifications are that Washington, more than Apple, made a big bet that if we invest, if we allow corporations to move their factories into China, we're going to help that country build a middle class. The middle class is going to demand certain values, and you're going to have another stumbling block for an authoritarian government, the same way we had done in Taiwan, West Germany, Korea and Japan. Right? I mean, some of these countries are literally like the ones we were fighting in World War II, and now they're thriving allies. And so we thought that was going to work in China. Instead, we empowered the Communist Party. You know, had Xi Jinping come into power, and now we've got allegations of Uyghur labor and concentration camps and all this kind of stuff. And in a sense, we're all complicit in it. So that's why it's problematic. I mean, but put it this way. Ten years from now, if Taiwan is just one more province of China, we will all have contributed that to some degree, because the takeover will have been because of the technological prowess, all based on an American consumer market that bought products made in China over the last 30 years. If that's not the case, Taiwan's flourishing, Xi Jinping is the last of the authoritarian rulers in China, then I think you know that you wouldn't look at that like that, and you would say, oh, look at that. It took longer than we expected. But the middle class did demand democracy or human rights or something like that in China. So that's why I say the history is. Or the future is unwritten, and therefore Tim Cook's legacy is unwritten. I'm trying to be sympathetic, and I think an astute reader will have their own impression, but I'm not trying to convince anyone of any particular point or ideology to make the point. It's trying to be as neutral as can be, with the caveat that there are a couple biting remarks. I own that.

Okay. I wanted to ask you just briefly about the story about Isabel Gamahi. I don't know if I pronounced her name correctly, but Apple's vice president, Managing director of Greater China. You go into her role there, and it sounds really through your narrative that she's a bit of an empty suit, yet at the same time, she's being praised by Fortune magazine as one of the most powerful women in the world. So I just had a quick question for you. What does that say about journalism? That when you dig in, you really find this person is not really very powerful at all within the company and probably not powerful beyond the company, and yet she's being promoted by magazines as this really person of stature.

Yeah, I don't know that I need to be too biting about the Fortune list, and I don't quite know how they make it together, but let me put it in ways that I think are quite sympathetic, which is to say that if you're just looking at positions that people have and then trying to judge who's powerful without sort of doing the deep dive interviews or whatever, then of course you would say she's powerful. Look, Apple is enormous in China. They have a $70 billion business there. They have the world's most leading supply chain, all based in China. Isabel is a vice president since 2008. She's the head of Greater China. So if you just sort of asked Apple questions, you'd find out that there's 14,000 employees directly in China for Apple. There's, of course, a supply chain of 3 million people. And you'd say, oh, my God, this is one woman that's leading this. This is amazing. Of course she's powerful. And to top it off, she's on the boards of Starbucks, she's on the board of Lululemon, and she's a representative for the American Chamber of Commerce for China. So you think, like, of course this woman's absolutely powerful now to just sort of like, you know, wildly tear all of that down. The chapter about her is called the Figurehead, and it's a really interesting chapter, I hope, which is basically that Apple was under great pressure around mid-2016, 2017, and they wanted to demonstrate in multifaceted ways all the ways that China was different and superior and important to them. And so they needed to name someone that was Chinese that spoke the language and put them on the executive team website so they could show to China, look, we don't have a head of any other country, but we do have a head of China. And she ends up being the only managing director within Apple in the entire country, in the entire world. I mean, they have 160,000 employees. There is no other managing director. And I quote, isabel, to make this point for the record, so Apple not to get too wonky on this is a functional organization, which means that each team is led by a technical expert. There is no general manager. And this is goes back to the days of Steve Jobs turnaround. This is just how the company's organized. So what does it mean to have a managing director of China, like, who reports up to her? And the answer is basically nobody. Like, she has some assistance. But the retail team, which is most of the 14,000 employees, they don't report to Isabel. The production team has their own operations managers and stuff that report back to Cupertino. She's not heading product design, she's not heading operations and so forth. So, look, this sounds all kind of nasty, and I'm not trying to make any particular point about Isabel. I think Apple made this cynical move where they hired someone, or rather they named someone, that didn't actually have the credentials to basically work within the political system of China. She's not a scholar of that area or anything, and she's not an operations guru in any sense. But they were cynical and they just thought, well, she's a Chinese face, and I'm literally quoting someone there, which is why she's hired. So I have to say, as a friendly Canadian that I am, I've never written such a negative portrayal of somebody, and I was discomfited by it. But the sourcing for it is really good. And I have to say, after the publication, an Asian woman living in America wrote to me and said, I didn't like how negative your portrayal was. And I sort of said, yeah, like, my apologies. Like, it is a pretty harsh narrative. But to be honest, I went way out of my way to find people who really thought highly of her and said she was doing great work. And I just couldn't find anyone. So, you know, what else you want me to do? Kind of thing. And then what's interesting is she wrote to me the week later, and she just had a meeting with Apple, and she hadn't even mentioned Isabel. And this person had said to her that Isabel had the most lucrative position in the company, considering she had almost no responsibilities. And so she laughed about it, and she's like, well, it turns out that you're right about that. But the sourcing goes well beyond, like, you know, some offhand anecdote. The figurehead, the name of the chapter was not something that I came up with on my own. Let's just say it that way.

You just provided a perfect segue to my next question. And one of the things I mentioned, I loved about this book, and I encourage all of our podcast listeners to grab it, whether audiobook or the ebook or a hard copy. But you did such great characterization and it was clear that you had so many inside sources. I mentioned John Ford and Doug Guthrie before, but even the characterization of Deedee Shushing, who was the ride hailing app CEO who was able to get a $1 billion investment from Apple. Just lots of great characters, lots of great sources. You know, you mentioned that Apple is notoriously secretive, more so than the US Military many times. Yet your work contains a lot of original, well sourced reporting. You know, how did you get Apple employees to speak to you? And do you sense that they're as concerned as as we might be about the company's manufacturing strategy and its long term legacy?

There's a couple of questions there. So let me answer one, which is just that, in a sense, the beauty of going after an organization that is so secretive is that if you get people to speak, everything they say is a scoop, right? In other words, if you talk to engineers in the late 90s and early 2000s and they've never talked to a journalist before, effectively everything they say is new. And then you have to go fact check it and source it and make sure that it's compelling and all that kind of stuff. But that was sort of the jiu jitsu trick, right? When you're doing jiu jitsu, you want to use like your own disadvantages and turn them into advantages, right? You know, if you're small, maybe nimble is the way you do that, right? And so to go after a secretive organization, at first you're thinking, how am I ever going to, going to get in there? And then you realize, wait a minute, like I'm probably the only person on the planet right now taking a full 18 months off just to ask these questions, just to reach out to thousands of people that have this experience. And so you realize that it's actually quite a big asset. If they were just public about everything, I wouldn't have a story to write. So that's kind of one of the answers. The second answer is that, you know, the book really is told through the eyes of Apple people. And so it's a. Obviously I get asked this question all the time, like it's such an NDA'd organization and you're talking about their operations in a really opaque environment. So how did you get in? And the answer is that the engineers that I speak to by and large are not the ones making the decision to go into China. They're just following the orders and then executing. And they're brilliant in their own ways, but a lot of them are disquieted by, in a sense, the Frankensteinian monster that they built. And so it was above their pay grade to decide maybe we should do this in Ohio or something. But they don't love the impact. They see the impact of their own career and think, I wish I had the opportunity to do this in Ohio. So I think that was the case. I haven't really had any critics within Apple, former or current, saying, you got this wrong or this is too unsympathetic or whatever. Instead, I've had people I never talked to to say, oh, this resonates with my own experience. And you also connected the dots in parts of area that I have Apple that I didn't know because it's a siloed organization. Right. By and large, the operations people don't know anything about the yellow Cows. That's crazy retail narrative involving gangsters. That's my favorite part of the book. And the people doing the retail stuff don't know anything about how Tony Blevins negotiates contracts. Right. It's a. It's a big organization, but more than that, it is a siloed organization. One hand doesn't know what the other is doing unless you're talking to, like, senior vice presidents or something. So, yeah, I hope I answered the question there.

Yeah, that was awesome. Patrick, as we start to wrap up, I wanted to ask you if there's anything that we missed that you want our listeners to know about the book.

So many things. Which is why they need to go read the book. Right. So my big. Honestly, my biggest fear of podcasts is that you have. People are like, that's interesting. But I guess I get the argument, like, why do I need, like the 400 page version? And the only thing I can try to convince people of is that we've of course, only scratched the surface, like quickly mentioning the yellow Cows, the gangsters there. Like, that's like four chapters in the book. And it's riveting.

I'll say it's riveting. Yeah, it's riveting.

I guess that's just the last thing.

I should say is, like, why should one read a corporate history? It's only a single company or whatever. And I would say I'm trying to write a history of, in a sense, Western involvement in China and how China became a pure competitor. I'm just trying to do it through the lens of Apple. But you don't have to care about Apple products. Per se to care about the narrative. If you understand that in a sense, the biggest geopolitical battle in the 21st century is China versus US. You want to handle on the artificial intelligence battles and so forth. I don't know that there's a more fun way of doing that and getting that four decade history than this book. I mean, I don't want to endorse my own book, but it's. It's a fast paced, densely narrative book and aside from the Apple details, you could get to the same thinking obviously just by reading academic treatises and stuff. But I think this is a pretty fun way to get there.

I will agree with that. We all enjoyed the book. I can speak for all three of us saying that we enjoyed it from the beginning to the end. Patrick, how can our listeners follow you on social media? And what are you up to next?

So appleinchina.com is my website. I'm on x patrickmgee underscore, but appleinchina.com is probably just easier to remember and then you can find all the links there. And the book, of course is on Amazon and Barnes and Noble Audible, as you said, has a good narrator who I chose specifically for it. What's next? I do have a book idea in the works right now. It doesn't involve Apple. It's so tentative that it might crash and burn in the next six to eight weeks. So there's not real much point in me going further into what that is. But just to say it doesn't involve Apple. Yeah, maybe I can't say much more than that, but it's a similarly large topical topic and I don't know that I'll ever write a book as sort of well timed, well sourced and important as I think Apple and Jenna is. But that'll be the big hope. So maybe we'll be back on your podcast in two and a half years.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

My pleasure.

It was awesome having Patrick on the show. David, tell us about what we're going to be reading for next month.

We're going to read the man who Solved the Market, How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman. It goes into the history of Renaissance technologies and their signature medallion fund, which has returned 66% year over year across decades. So will be exciting to learn more about this financial company.

Sounds like a Bernie Madoff type of situation. I'll have to read the book. Okay. Anything else that either of you want to plug? And how can our listeners get in touch with you.

You can follow me on x@davidg short.

And you can follow me on Weibo. I mean x@hudaxbasement. That's h u d A k s basement.

And I was just kidding, of course. And you can follow me on X. I'm at Dave Kopeck D A V E K O P E C We love doing the podcast, and we hope you love listening to it. And if you do, please don't forget to leave us a review on your podcast player of choice. Follow Us Subscribe Whether you're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or just listening to the episodes on YouTube, it helps the show, and we read every comment. We'll see you next month.

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